AJ Tuan Le

This week, we get to talk about taking a moment to acknowledge when the nature world sparks my imagination and how that moment contribute to my story.

Honestly, I sometimes don’t feel like I am as creative as others, could be for various reasons, too busy in life, too much going on, this whole creative thing is still new for my new career path, maybe I am too old for any creative juice. I still try not to give up and will try to pursue this dream. 

I try my best to find inspiration everyday, by just going through some magazines, watching a lot of youtube tutorials, or even just simply looking at other people’s work and trying to see and learn how it is done. 

I also starting to get back to running, when I run, especially around the parks with lake views, it totally helps me put a pause on everything else in life, the stress, the work, and just to relax, feel free, and just simple admiring the nature, the color of the green of Pacific Northwest, the water, the mountain, the wild flowers on the running path, the geese, the birds, I can see colors and I can put things together, only wish I could draw better to capture all the feeling at that moment. 

Here are my thoughts for this, if you have any recommendation, or advice, please share as I am still trying to find my voice, my design style, my calling from this new career path I am doing. Thank you! Ciao for now.

For this moodboard, I would like to tell a story of our fur babies who stay at home, looking through window to see the beautiful grass and tree outside and wanting to go out to play, what can help take off the need for them to go out while we are not home? THE PETCUBE.

Brown and Green tones bring warmthness, luxury and welcoming feeling, brown could represent the home, the furnitures, the window, or even the pets, the green could represent the outdoor, the grass, the tree, the excitement. I also chose some happy smiling image to represent the joys when the pets can see the treat or communicate through the petcube.

For this week blog, I would like to start with a full time job when I done with school for various reasons.

The most important part is stable income, benefits, I also can learn more and improve myself in the field with a full time job rather than freelance or contract, once I get more comfortable, I would get into freelance or contract, I even can do that on the side while I am doing my full time job

That is just my thought, and below are my 3 jobs post on contract/agency:

1. Graphic designer for The Pokemon company international (12 months fixed contract)

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/graphic-designer-12-month-fixed-term-contract-at-the-pok%C3%A9mon-company-international-3539532228?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic

2. Graphic designer at Comrise

https://www.recruit.net/job/graphic-designer-jobs/9F67455473702067?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic

3. Brand visual designer at Braintrust

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/brand-visual-designer-freelance-remote-at-braintrust-3603312945?refId=%2F%2BPcQ6lUR5DKpdYGe3mmgA%3D%3D&trackingId=SXkCPFlMfNXusO00LgL%2FsQ%3D%3D&trk=public_jobs_topcard-title

This week we got to watch a few video from CUT, very interesting, very entertaining. I have come across from CUT’s videos before but I didn’t know its from CUT and base in Seattle. I found most of the videos are very fun, entertain, but some also very annoying (maybe I get annoying from the cast members)

Here is my idea for the group game: We could have everyone get together like when we play the egg game couple weeks ago. For this, we can have everyone play the game of Heads Up!, maybe in smaller teams, questions will be both graphic, and photography major related, something that been taught to both or have similar interests that both major students know about (artist, color, etc), Or we could play with students names, to see if everyone are familiar with everyone names in other class, let say if the Name comes up, people can only describe that person through their facts. I think Heads Up is a very fun and engaging game that everyone love to play, again, the contents on the questions are up to you guys, we can make it educational, or we can just make it fun and icebreaker for new students in the program. Simple but fun.

METAVERSE – It might be a new term for some of us but I am sure it is not new for the younger generation these day, and it will going to our new next big thing soon. It’s like a whole new world out there for people to explore, to express themself however they want without rules, without borders. I don’t know if this will be something that I will be interest in moving forward with at the moment, BUT, I can see great potential of advertising as well as a great entertainment tool.

My partner working for Meta, and in the Oculus team, so we always get to experience and play with all the new oculus and its new games, GREAT entertainment, so much fun even though I am not a gamer, but it is more than just games. It is just something I, myself can not play for too long, my eyes starting to hurt from all the reality views through the lens, similar to when we navigate around, my head couldn’t handle it in a long period, maybe it is just me.

Speaking of the advertisement tool, I already see a lot of fashion houses already invested in this to advertise and showcase their items and brand, so we already see this could be huge in the near future.

I truly can not wait to see more of this and see where it will lead our future to be. EXCITING!

This week we had our amazing speaker Adam Knight speaking to us about his business, his company and the video industry. Very inspiring of how he has his company started and keep growing year by year, also I very enjoyed the recap videos each each he made just to see what the company accomplished within the year. That’s a fun project to do to end the year.

To share some of my experiences from previous work/project, I’d like to talk about create and foster trust with clients, I was in retail the last 7 years at Gucci, and building client relationship is one of the most important for us. Having trust from clients can not only leading into another preferrals, but also giving you all other benefits working with them, time to time, some of us do fail to maintain the relationship or building relationship with someone due to some facts included different personalities, client with high demands, mistakes we made that upset clients or ruined the trust. All we could do is just admit the mistake, apologies, learn from it and moving on.

Listened to Adam, I realized we will be working with clients in almost every job we will be doing, no matter it is in retails, or in the design, or creative field, you just need to learn how to deal with them, how to build the trust/relationship and how important to have those relationship with your clients will help you in the long run. We often saying that we treat everyone as a client and not just a customer, and we treat every clients just as our friends.

That’s all for today’s blog, see you next week! Ciao.

Hello! Sorry for the late post but here is my short video on 2 minutes or less on a networking elevator scenerior. I spent over an hour to figure how to reduce my video to under 20 Mb, I tried with few different applications. Please click download to view the video, and the script is below:

Hiiii (very exciting tone), wow, I love your outfit, that’s a very cool jacket you have there, my name is AJ, how are you doing?

Oh hi Chris (or Christine), nice to meet you too, yes, I am Vietnam, how do you know? that’s a very good guess, and ya, I do speak Vietnamese fluently, do you speak any other language?

Cool cool, are you a graphic designer? WHATTTT, ME TOO! and I just graduated from the SCCA, I also have a degree in Marketing as well, so I am very passionate in design, branding and marketing, how’s about you?…..

Wow, you story is very impressive, I have to run now but I would love to sit down for coffee or tea sometime? so we can share more about all the adventures that got us here.

(take out my business card). It was a pleasure meeting with you, here is my card with my contact information, I also have my website there if you want to check out some of my work. I am looking forward to sit down with you soon, see ya next time Chris (Christine).

First and foremost, you might have wondering why I am skipping from blog number 4 to number 5, WHERE IS BLOG #3? Of course I am not forget about it, I just love to spend some more extra time to finess my thoughts and how to write a better blog #4, but it will be on here soon, I promise.

Back to Brit and her last slide that said “Hard skills will get you the interviews, soft skills will get you the job.”, thinking more into this, I can strongly listing my 3 hard skills are: 1. I have a marketing background (an AA degree), 2. I am a strong visual person, I worked as a visual merchandiser as my previous job, and 3. my graphic design education that I am taking. Also I would say my 3 soft skills are: 1. we could say teamwork and communication is my strong soft skill, I am a people person, I love meeting people, making new connections, learning from others stories, work well in team and very good as listen to others too. 2. organizational and attention to details, I kinda have an OCD when it comes to things around me, I like to make sure things being organized, included schedules, appointments, things to do, etc. 3. Adaptability as I am a immigrant from other country, I can see myself adapted to living here, with new language, new culture, now I started a new career path after working for almost 10 years.

For the 2 hard skills I would like to develop during the next year and the half at SCCA would be my visual skill and also my graphic design, hand in hand I know both of these will help me grow stronger in the career path that I am pursuing, will help me find a job in the field that I am interested in, and hopefully not just one but many doors will open for me once I graduated from SCCA.

For 2 softs skill I would like to develop are leadership and time-management. When I mention leadership, I feel like I am a people pleaser, I like to make everyone happy rather than stepping up and lead people, in group setting, I would love to share my ideas but will agree with others on theirs just to have the project done rather than strongly push on and become a team leader. Time-management, as deadline, and procrastinating, I always on time, in meetings, or school, or work schedules, but when it come to projects, I most of the time will procrastinate until the last minutes to do my work, I would love to won on managing my time and schedule better just to be more productive on more creatively on my projects rather than rushing everything last minutes..

Honestly, thinking these out loud while writing this blog helped me realize there are so many hard skills and soft skills I have and some that I can work on to improve. Now I kinda understand the purpose of writing all these blogs. Thank you! See you in the next one. Ciao.

This week speaker was Andrew Nedimyer and honestly, this is the best guest speaker we have had so far in my opinion, listening and seeing the work of Andrew was so much fun, he was so engaging and very relatable to us in so many level.

Talking about personal projects, it remind me of my little project call “A photo a day” back in 2016, I did this to motivate myself to go out more, find some activities and capture the moment everyday and post about it on Instagram rather than just being a introvert and make up excuses to avoid go outside and do anything. It was a success through that little project, I got to go out so much more, eat out more, explore the city more, travel more, find more cool activities to do such as, snowboarding, ice skating, water paddling, hiking to new places and get to meet a tons of new friends at that time. I was very please I did that.

Looking forward, I would love to find a special personal project that design related, could be starting to build a strong portfolio, could be getting involve more into the design circle, make more friends in the field etc.

For this, I think I need to set out timeline for myself, first off, I would like to build a simple website for myself where I can upload all my work on it later on, find some good inspirations for it, within this year of 2023, I also want to start looking into some small design business (maybe design candle, tshirt, or even stickers) while I am still in school learning. That would be my plan for my personal project of 2023. I will keep you all update later on. See you later at my next blog.